She’d made it. The forest floor outside the garden remained blessedly stable, no sifting or wriggling. She became aware of the chill in the air and the sense of reality, colors making sense again. Turning around, she saw the hole into the Dream sewing itself up, like a wound healing. And just in time, as the monster sharked toward the opening, lunging partway through, teeth gnashing. Thorn jumped back with a small shriek and the portal closed over its snout, clipping off a chunk with a couple of fangs.
The severed piece fell to the leaf litter, twitched, then thinned to a shadow of itself until it vanished entirely. Maybe the dream creatures couldn’t survive in the waking world. Her butterflies had likely already vanished.
Now that the portal had closed itself and disappeared, Thorn looked at the white fence with its winter-hibernating rose canes threading black and threatening all through it—and to the cottage within. A sense of unreality still shivered over her skin. She’d, of course, never seen her home from the outside. The rambling cottage looked picturesque as in a storybook, with its gingerbread eaves and many-paned windows, slumbering within the winter-bare garden.
In fact, it looked utterly abandoned, no lights within, no smoke curling from the chimney. How long had Jada been away this time? Perhaps it had taken her much longer to wake herself up than she’d realized. Or maybe it always looked this way. Everything looked kind of wrong, as if the shadows had extra edges and the colors had shifted into something like in a painting. Not quite real. Like in the Dream. Could it be she was still in the Dream and not the waking world? She wasn’t at all sure how to tell the difference.
Shivering, Thorn realized it was more than the chilling sense of unreality and dreadful worry that had her cold within and without. She wore only the gown, stockings, and slippers she typically wore around the house. It hadn’t occurred to her to bring the blankets from the root cellar and, of course, she hadn’t been able to prepare and have handy the cloak and gloves she used for her winter rambles around the garden. And she couldn’t go back for them. The wards prickled against her face, even sharper from the outside than they’d felt from within.
So, the wardshadbeen keeping people—or something—out, as well as keeping Thorn in. And now, here she was, outside, alone, and unprotected. Still, all of these things were signs she was in the real world and not the Dream, right? It had been so long since she dreamed that she couldn’t remember if people got cold in them. At least she wasn’t in the root cellar. And it would be stupid to stay here.
Rubbing her arms as the chill worked its way into her, Thorn turned her back on the cottage and surveyed the shadowed columns of tree trunks darkly marching into infinity, the lone path that wended to the distant road. Whichever way she went on that road, she might freeze before she got to shelter.
Looking up to where Moriah silently watched from the tree limb above, tail dangling languidly, just the tip twitching, Thorn considered her questions, wondering which the cat might be mostly likely to spend breath answering. “Which way should I go?”
The cat only watched with glowing emerald eyes. That’s what Thorn thought. It would be up to her. “Can you at least tell me if I’m still in the Dream or awake?”
In answer—or rather, in lieu of an answer—Moriah stood, stretched, then leapt to the ground light as a shadow. “Some lessons, child,” the black cat said, not unkindly, “you must learn for yourself.”
“Please don’t leave,” she cried, but the cat vanished, becoming one with the deep shadows of the forest. Leaving Thorn alone, as always.
11
“Again,” Master Zoltan said for the hundredth time, tempting Rose to hurl something from the Dream at him. Nothing too lethal or painful. A glob of mud, maybe. Or a gobbet of gremlin slime. One thing about the Dream, you could find most anything there, real or imagined, if you looked long enough. If someone could dream it up, it lived in the Dream somewhere.
But she was getting distracted.
“You’re losing focus,” Zoltan informed her, echoing her thoughts.
“I’m tired,” she retorted. “And hungry.”
“I’m aware. You must learn to work through exhaustion, through privation. Especially when it comes to physically entering the Dream. What if your only possible exit from a losing battle is entering the Dream? In such a scenario, you would be low on magic, low on physical energy, perhaps wounded. Will you then ask the enemy to allow you to rest a moment, perhaps share their snacks? Before they take you captive to torture their enemy’s secrets from you or before the sorcerers employed by the enemy summarily execute you, will you ask if everyone can spot you an hour or so for a nice nap before you escape?”
Rose glared impotently at him, wanting to reply in sarcastic kind, but restraining herself. This was practice, not a battlefield, and her very first day of trying a skill so difficult that only a few oneiromancers in a generation were able to master it, and…
And she was making excuses for herself.
She could do this. She would prove it to the world, to Master Zoltan, and to herself. With knife-edged focus that shedrummed up from somewhere deep beyond her reserves, Rose delineated a portal, the edges crisp, the angles perfect. Exactly the correct size for her to step through, with no slop.
“Better,” Zoltan said, somewhere in the distance outside the circle of her concentration. “Now, open it, observing protocol. Do not allow the portal to admit anything back into the waking realm.”
This was the first time he’d allowed her to go this far. Suppressing the distracting surge of satisfaction at her accomplishment, she allowed the boundary between the waking world and the Dream to dissolve. It was afternoon in their part of the world, which meant the Dream was at one of its lowest ebbs. People dreamed most and longest after midnight and into the morning, so the time after most people had awakened and few had entered the dreaming phase of sleep meant the Dream had thinned. Of course, the Dream, brewed from millennia of dreamers, never faded entirely, but it did wax and wane with the contribution of active dreaming from living beings, human or animal.
It was no coincidence Zoltan had chosen this hour for Rose to try her first physical entry to the Dream, she knew. When she’d first begun to deliberately access the Dream—after years of schooling in how to control her own dreams, wall off her unconscious from the Dream, and prevent herself from accidentally accessing the Dream—she’d worked at this time of day also.
As the boundary thinned inside the portal she’d made, Rose realized she didn’t know whether to look or not. “Do I…” she began.
“Yes, you must look,” Zoltan answered before she finished. “I am not going to, for obvious reasons. Butyoumust, to see where you are going. Use your sorcery to maintain your control. You control the Dream, not the other way around.”
She opened her eyes, having habitually closed them while she concentrated, as she’d been taught and, as she now realized, as a safety precaution to keep from accidentally gazing into theDream while conscious. For the first time since she was a child, before she developed the self-discipline not to, she looked at the Dream directly.
It was exactly as she remembered and not at all the same. The Dream changes constantly, of course, in continuous flux both as active dreamers come and go, but also as a manifestation of its inherent nature. There is no up or down, no right or left. Dimensions range from nothing to multitudes. Time passes, advances, rewinds itself, loops endlessly, or stops altogether.
And the colors. Rose had forgotten how the colors of the Dream are so beyond those of any reality. Dreamers tend to dream in black-and-white, in grayscale, or in lurid spectrums imaginable only in that realm beyond waking. The colors almost breathed in the Dream, like living beings in their own right, mutable and moving, solidifying one moment and evaporating the next. It was entrancing and enticing. Rose felt her mind struggling to comprehend what she saw.
“Don’t lose the thread of control, Rose,” Zoltan commanded. “Look, see—but do not allow the Dream to command your attention. Use your magic. If you cannot look through the portal and keep your focus, you are not ready to attempt actually stepping into the Dream. If you have any uncertainty on that front, we must cease this experiment now.”
She refused to fail before she’d even begun, so she gave herself a stern mental shake. “I’ve got it,” she replied in a steady tone. “I’m looking. I have my focus.”
